Rebecca Gratz's Romance. 5. The Poem

This narrative thread begins here.


In 1807,  Rebecca Gratz wrote a poem about lost love, and it dovetails with what we already know.  She begins by stating that it had been two years since she had received a marriage proposal.  In her letter of August 11, 1805, she had implied that Samuel Ewing's proposal had taken place a week or two before; the poem is dated July 23, 1807, which must have been very close to the second anniversary of the event.  She also says in the course of the poem that she had loved him for five years which coincides with the 1800-1805 span when Ewing was the man she most often mentioned in her letters.

So I think we can agree that the poem is referring to the same man and the same proposal.  How do I know it is a proposal?  Rebecca uses a fairly common metaphor of the time for a lover and his beloved.  She calls the man a "votary," that is, a person who has devoted his life to the service of a god (or goddess).  She is then the goddess at whose "shrine" he makes his request.  In some poems which use this metaphor, the "votary" is requesting sex, but here we can be sure it is marriage.

The poem is of more biographical than literary interest,  but the pain and sorrow it expresses have the ring of authenticity.   Rebecca dated the poem and I have used that as the title.

July 23rd, 1807

'Tis two revolving years since thou

A votary at my shrine didst bow.

With melting heart & listening ear I gave thy suit a pitying tear

And Love! who on thy lips still hung

Caught soft persuasion from thy tongue

And what thy passion would impart

Sank glowing to my yielding heart.

The world receded from my view

And nought remain'd but love of you.

I hung with rapture on thine arm

Unconscious that the stern alarm

Of interfering faith must come 

And call the wandering mortal home.

The moment given to joy is o'er

And love and bliss are mine no more!

I with feign'd indifference met thy glance

And seem to fly when thou'st advance

But ah! the lesson duty gives

My breaking heart so weak receives.

That even time whose fabled power

Can take from memory passion's hour

On me cannot such conquest claim

Whose heart and fate are still the same.

My heart! whose sensibility has oft 

When thou hast smiled forgot its (illeg)

To laugh in thy joy--My heart! whose (illeg)

For five long years was faithful unto thee

By interfering fate now torn from thine

is wrecked of joy, of peace, of every dream

Where hope & thou alone were cherished.

The summer eve no more brings joy to me

For thou art fled and the dull hours move on

Unheeded in the lapse of time--The moon

Whose soften'd luster once my soul could wake

Now shines to gild my sorrow and to show

how deep how dark is the color of my fate.  

My yawning grave is lighted by her beauty

And all its horror open to my view

But Hope bright Cherub! lifts the veil beyond

And with seraphic promise points to bliss!

There thou shall meet me and renew thy love!

Mortal pangs shall never reach me more.

[Our souls united shall be blest

Oh blissful promise!]

This seems to be a draft rather than a finished piece.  Rebecca started with rhymed couplets and then dropped the rhyme completely about halfway through.  The tenses of verbs do not always agree and the punctuation is sketchy.  I have put the last two lines in brackets because they appear on the back of the piece of birch bark on which the poem was written. They do seem to be appropriate, and the poem ends rather abruptly without them.

Also on the back of the poem are some crossed-out lines:  "[My] heart!  Thy image faithful bears\ My fate still dooms me to despair\ A prey to both, I languish on\ Uplift my soul, "Thy will be done"\ with holy resignation cry."  Rebecca already had pictured her "yawning grave;" she must have deemed these verses just too much, or simply too direct.

Despite the fact that the verses were unpolished and she had left scribbles on the back of the page,  Rebecca was finished with this poem.  She rolled it up into a scroll and tied it with a pink ribbon.  She then kept it for the rest of her life.

The purpose of the poem?  Depressives sometimes become hypochondriacal and  think they are dying. This could have been  the case with Rebecca, and the poem was a message which she hoped would find its way to Samuel Ewing (it is, after all, addressed to her former love) after she died.  She outlived him by nearly 50 years, but she held on to the poem. Perhaps her intention had changed, and it was for posterity she left her message of love and sacrifice.

So, yes, Rebecca loved Samuel Ewing and he loved her. It isn't just a pious fable or an exaggeration of the seriousness of their relationship.  She gave him up and it was not easy.  She put the requirements of her religion first, but in this poem she no longer denied her feelings for him.  In fact she continued to believe their love was a good thing; it just took place on the wrong plane of being.  She dared to hope that in heaven it would be blessed.

Rebecca survived her ordeal and went on to live a useful and satisfying life.  To see how she presented herself a quarter of a century after her love affair, go to the post,  "The Rosenbach Acquires Sully Portrait of Rebecca Gratz."


(The poem is in the Gratz Family Collection at the American Philosophical Society.  It is now in two pieces (the birch bark is very fragile) and a conservator used the faded pink ribbon,  with which Rebecca had tied up the poem originally, to bind together some sheets of protective paper into a booklet in which the pieces of the poem now reside.)

Rebecca's Monotheism

Alexander Pope's "The Universal Prayer," Rebecca Gratz's favorite poem, provided her with some views, which if not heterodox, were not exactly traditional in western religion.

The most important of these is enunciated in the very first stanza of Pope's poem:

Father of all! In every age,

In every clime adored,

By saint, by savage, and by sage,

Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

There is in Pope's universe not one God and many false gods; for him, every "god" represents the human attempt to understand the One.

Here is Rebecca, writing in 1834:

"The sublime, beneficent holy Spirit, to which all forms are but the outward costumes in which different nations chuse [sic] to dress it -- is still the same and all who lift their souls on high in Adoration -- may walk the earth in charity with one another...."

This sounds like Pope and makes clear how Rebecca's religious toleration, one of her most attractive qualities, is tied in her belief in the One behind the many.

In 1837 Rebecca found another writer who used a clothing metaphor to explain the variety of gods worshipped on earth (and much else). Here is an excerpt from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored):

"Church-clothes are...the Vestures, under which men have embodied and represented for themselves the Religious Principle....They are first spun and woven, I may say so, by that wonder of wonders, Society...."

Rebecca read Sartor Resartus and sent it on to her "book buddy," Maria Gratz, her sister-in-law in Kentucky. In following letters she asked Maria what she thought of it, but sadly, if they had a discussion through the mail, the letters have not survived. I remember reading Sartor Resartus in college and being amazed that what in many ways could be termed an early Existentialist work had been written in the 1830's. Just as surprising was that although his satirical jibes had not aged well, Carlyle's prose style was still exhilarating. I would love to know what Rebecca and Maria, two spiritual pilgrims (and by no means Existentialists), made of this extraordinary work.

The second of Pope's non-traditional opinions was that God could not be Lord of Earth alone in a universe so large:

Yet not to earth's contracted span

Thy goodness let me bound.

Or think Thee Lord alone of man,

When thousand worlds are round.

This idea got Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in 1600, but by the eighteenth century it was less a scandal and more of an interesting speculation which even the Roman Catholic Alexander Pope could take up in print. There is no evidence in her writings that Rebecca believed in multiple worlds, but based on what I know about her it is possible she would have found it an intellectually stimulating topic, but of not much use in determining the best way to live her life, the focus of religion for her.

Rebecca's Favorite Poem

Much of Rebecca Gratz's girlhood education in literature must have been given over to the memorization of poetry. A niece remembered that she and her sisters played a game in which Aunt Becky quoted a few lines of poetry and everyone tried to guess the poem. The same niece said that Rebecca's favorite was Alexander Pope's "The Universal Prayer," and its place in her life is revealed in a letter from the late 1850's. Rebecca at Saratoga Springs had started to write down the poem for a woman she had met there, but found she was unsure of a line in the last verse. (At 76, she was certainly allowed her senior moment.) She wrote to her nephew in Philadelphia to have the poem copied out and sent immediately. Here is the poem Rebecca thought was important enough to get right:

The Universal Prayer

by

Alexander Pope

Father of all! In every age,

In every clime adored,

By saint, by savage, and by sage,

Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou Great First Cause, least understood

Who all my sense confined

To know but this, that Thou art good

And that myself am blind.

Yet gave me, in this dark estate,

To see the good from ill;

And, binding Nature fast in fate,

Left free the human will.

What conscience dictates to be done,

Or warns me not to do,

This teach me more than Hell to shun,

That more than Heaven pursue.

What blessings Thy free bounty gives

Let me not cast away;

For God is paid when man receives;

To enjoy is to obey.

Yet not to earth's contracted span

Thy goodness let me bound.

Or think Thee Lord alone of man,

When thousand worlds are round.

Let not this weak, unknowing hand

Presume Thy bolts to throw,

And teach damnation round the land

On each I judge Thy foe.

If I am right, Thy grace impart

Still in the right to stay;

If I am wrong, oh teach my heart

To find that better way!

Save me alike from foolish pride,

Or impious discontent,

At aught Thy wisdom has denied,

Or aught that goodness lent.

Teach me to feel another's woe,

To right the fault I see;

That mercy I to others show,

That mercy show to me.

Mean though I am, not wholely so,

Since quickened by Thy breath;

Oh, lead me wheresoe'er I go,

Through this day's life or death.

This day be bread and peace my lot:

all else beneath the sun

Thou know'st if best bestowed or not,

And let Thy will be done!

To Thee Whose temple is of space,--

Whose altar earth, sea, skies,--

One chorus let all beings raise!

All Nature's incense rise.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), England's greatest poet of the eighteenth century, is not much read today. Although he has not fallen in scholarly esteem, his satires are too topical to be easily accessible to modern readers and his poetic style has gone out of fashion. The heroic couplets, for which Pope was famous, and the "common meter" of this poem are a little too obvious for most twentieth- and twenty-first-century tastes.

The poetry cannot be said to be short on substance, and Pope's outlook is echoed in Rebecca's writings. Like him, she believed in a loving but unknowable God who moved "in mysterious ways" (to quote another of her favorite poets William Cowper). She was very sensitive to the power of conscience, the importance of its guidance and the hell on earth which guilt could cause.

She also saw her spiritual bond with God not dependent on right theological beliefs so much as on the way she lived her life, with mercy, kindness and toleration.

"The Universal Prayer" was a very popular poem for two hundred years, and most people who liked it were happy to overlook some of its elements which are not traditional Christian or Jewish beliefs. Rebecca did more than that; she embraced at least one of his more unorthodox views.

To be continued in "Rebecca's Monotheism."

(The niece who remembered Rebecca's mastery of poetry was Sarah Hays Mordecai. She wrote "Recollections of My Aunt, Rebecca Gratz" in 1870; it was privately published in 1893 (31 pp).

Her letter from Saratoga is undated but internal evidence puts it at 1857. It is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society.)